On the beginning

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate. Public accounts tend to have a fictional texture - this is not to say they're untrue, but they are writerly explanations, fished from the sea that is the book itself. I've written a few pieces like that over the years; eventually those accounts replace real memories, the way a single childhood photograph stands in for a half a dozen childhood summers. I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers. To a friend you say: "I started writing today, about 11am. I think it's the new book." Two months later you say: "I read that book by _______ today, it made me feel depressed, I think I have to rewrite what I did last week." And other innocuous comments every few months until you call them at four in the afternoon three years later and demand they come out for a drink, right now, because you've finished.

The clues to the more personal elements of that process are in the writer's private past, the subconscious family romances that return you to the same ideas over and over. I'm too superstitious to unpick those, and actually I don't know how useful personal history is with a writer like me - so much of my past is book-shaped. The larger clues are on the shelves and piled up on the desk. In the case of On Beauty, these books were all old favourites, because I was teaching them at Harvard. Nabokov, Forster, Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Paula Fox, John Updike, WG Sebald, to name half the syllabus. I think there are currents that run through On Beauty that are profoundly subconscious (I dreamt most of the plot - under the influence of my Forster class), but the greater impulse was certainly "intended" and fed by the sudden remembrance of how much I loved a certain kind of novel and how I had, in my writing life, suppressed my love for such novels. With a brazen ahistoricism I can't intellectually defend, around February 2003 I indulged myself and sat down to write the big, "realist" (better to say in the style of Realism), slightly Edwardian novel that I had dreamt of writing as a child. It was the book I couldn't quite manage when I was 20, sitting down to write White Teeth. I thought I might manage it now, and have it done and be able to move on to other things.

One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the "search for identity", and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search. The intention of On Beauty was all the other way round. The "search for identity" is a pointless, misery-inducing concept. When I was writing, I thought the comic tautology and sheer metaphysical weirdness of a black boy like Levi wanting to be "more black" (to me this is like saying I want to be more arm-having or I want to be more nose-possessing) was explicit, almost too much so. But maybe not. My sympathy is with an old-fashioned existentialism; it is the struggle to "be" that interests me when I write; to "be" without mediation or self-delusion. The kind of satire I write aspires - as George Saunders said recently - "to the indirect praise of perfection". My characters are all wrong-headed in their own ways - we used to call it "false consciousness". Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. Whatever is still standing at the end represents those things I have realised (by doing the writing itself) I value.

I find myself occupied by someone else's quote during composition. For White Teeth it was cinematic and naive; Katie Hepburn saying: "The time to make up your mind about people is ... never!" For On Beauty the following quote from David Foster Wallace (he is talking about Kafka's work) sat deep in my book, and somehow upbraided me whenever I was tempted to lie or sell something short or go for the easy joke or ... well, a lot of things. I still did all those things, but I think I did them less than I would have if this quote hadn't been bugging me: "The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle [...] our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." In struggling to be more of a Muslim you show yourself to be, in fact, a Muslim. In your battle with the idea of femininity you prove yourself a woman. If the word "blackness" doesn't cover boys like Levi, then it is the word that is lacking, not the boy. On Beauty was my old-fashioned attempt to make tight words larger so that my characters (and I) can live in them comfortably. Not too comfortably - just enough to feel alive.